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Wherever I went in the States I was asked by journalists to say what I thought the resultant type of American was going to be. America seemed feverishly anxious to get an answer to that question. No one can answer it, but it is exciting to speculate.
"Are you aware that in a few years we shall come to such a pass that it will be a stand-up fight, Americans versus Jews?" said one man to me. "The influence of the other races goes for nothing beside the influence of the Jews. The Jews are buying up all the real estate, they make any sacrifice for education, they get the better of Christians nine times out of ten. A Jewish pedlar comes past this door one day, and I think, 'Poor wretch!' Next year he comes past in a buggy; next year I find he owns a big general store in the town; next year he owns a department store and employs a thousand hands. He is too much for us."
What is to be the emerging American? At New York I was inclined to answer, "A sort of English-speaking Russian Jew who believes in dollars and sensual pleasures before all else, who, however, reads advanced literature, and whilst he is poor is an anarchist, and when he is rich is more tyrannous than the Tsar—more tyrannous, but never illegally so." But when I escaped into the country I found that New York was not America, but only a great hostelry on the threshold of that country. I learned the great control power of the Anglo-Saxon and Dutch Americans, the subtle influence of the Russian people, who after all not only dominate the Jews in Russia, but give them many traits of the Russian national character, making out of a materialist something which is almost a sentimentalist. There are many Jews in Russia who have become de-judaised by the Russians, and indeed the Christian Jew has become part of the very fabric of that bureaucracy which the poor persecuted mob of Hebrews hate and fear. The Russians are a strong influence in the development of the American. And the Germans and Norwegians and Swedes and Danes, who swiftly change to a species of American hardly distinguishable from the old Anglo-Saxon and Dutch type? They cannot go for nothing, they are not simply raw material, but are moulders and fashioners as well. The coming American will be a very recognisable relation of the Teutonic peoples. But he will nevertheless be clearly and decidedly different from any one race on the Continent.
Even to-day an American is distinctly recognisable as such on the pavements of London, Berlin, or Paris. You know him by his face; he does not need to speak to reveal his nationality. You can even tell a man who has spent five years in the country; something new has been moulded into his face and has crept into his eyes. I have even noticed it in the face of Russian peasants returning from America after two years away from Russia, travelling in a Russian train to their little village home.
"You are American?" I asked of them.
"Yes, boss, you are rait," they replied, and smiled knowingly.
They then began to enlarge on what a wonderful place America was—just like American tourists in Switzerland.
But the American of to-day is not the American of to-morrow. The Tsar's subjects coming into America at the rate of a quarter of a million a year ensure that, the flocking of almost whole nations from South-Eastern Europe ensure it. As I said, none can tell what the new American nation will be. We can only watch the wonderful patterns and colours that form in the great ballet and choir dance, the mingling in the labyrinths of destiny, the disappearances and the emergences, the involution and the evolution. It is something enacted within the mystery of the human race itself.